1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to enterprise level storage group management and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing highly available storage groups.
2. Description of the Related Art
Organizations may currently utilize various technologies to process, secure and/or store mission critical data. For example, such organizations may maintain a datacenter that consists of a number of nodes (e.g., computers). Employees utilize these nodes to increase productivity and manage several tasks to the benefit of the organizations. As another example, such organization may also implement an enterprise level email management system through which the employees may communicate documents to each other and/or individuals from other organizations.
Each computer user (e.g., employee) may be associated with a mailbox (e.g., one or more database files) to which outgoing and incoming emails are stored. One or more mailboxes may form a storage group, which may be controlled by a particular node. In order to maintain productivity at optimal levels, system administrators must configure these storage groups to be highly available. Accordingly, a specific mailbox must be migrated to another node efficiently and quickly in order to mitigate the detrimental effects related to system and/or software failures.
Unfortunately, conventional email server applications cannot provide high availability solutions for n-node computer systems (e.g., computer clusters). These email server applications are unable to migrate individual storage groups and/or mailboxes to another node in response to a system failure and/or overloading. Instead, these email server application failover entire email servers (e.g., physical machines and/or virtual machines), which includes each and every associated storage group. As such, they are unable to accommodate the needs of the system administrators.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for providing highly available storage groups to an n-node computer cluster.